Let It Be Broke
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The poems in Ed Pavlić’s Let It Be Broke are ignited by sonic memories—from Chaka Khan on the radio to his teenaged daughter singing “Stay” at a local café—that spark a journey into personal and ontological questions. Pavlić’s lyric lines are equal parts introspection and inter-spection, a term he coins for the shared rumination that encourages some collective deep thinking about the arbitrary boundaries that perpetuate racial and geographic segregation and the power of words to transcend those differences. In an epiphanic moment, Pavlić recalls a quote shared by a former teacher as “a hammer made of written words,” and how he held “onto those words / as if they were steel bars and I was dangling over some bright black deepness.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The powerful, ruminative 11th book from Pavlic (Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno) tracks the movements, crises, and severed realizations of an intellectually ambivalent, multiracial speaker in a legally complex and interpersonally troubled social world of the United States. "The poet" is "at the movies one eye on the man coming through/ the entrance the other// eye on the route to the emergency marked: exit." The book's middle section, "Documentary Shorts," features shorter, lyric poems, while the long sequence "All Along It Was a Fever" is rich with direct and emotionally charged lines informed by the weight of history, fatherhood, and sexuality. Pavlic emphatically and attentively observes and riffs on what unites and divides people within countries, races, families, and even among individuals. "The bars of the cage are made mostly/ of the nothing between them," he writes. "What,/ exactly, are they (you think it matters who?) shooting at." This suite of poems is an impressive, revolutionary exploration of America's violent history.
